Re: [PATCH 08/12] Use clock_gettime to implement gettimeofday.

[Zack Weinberg <zackw at panix dot com>]

On 8/20/19 11:24 AM, Joseph Myers wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Aug 2019, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> 
>> __gettimeofday is no longer called by anyone, so remove its internal
>> prototype and its entries in Versions and .abilist files.  (It would
>> have been a GLIBC_PRIVATE symbol if the GLIBC_PRIVATE convention had
>> been invented back in the days of 2.0.)
> 
> That's not obviously safe. ... __gettimeofday is certainly the kind of symbol 
> that could have been used by a library with its own namespace concerns 
> (cf. past discussions of how we might enable libstdc++ to be 
> namespace-clean), although maybe more likely to have been used by an 
> application that should be using gettimeofday.

Ugh, OK, I'll put it back in the Versions file.

> Perhaps someone set up to do so could check large sets of current and past 
> distribution binaries for any reference to the __gettimeofday symbol in 
> executable / shared library dynamic symbol tables, as evidence for whether 
> such an ABI change is safe or not?

I don't think this is important enough to go to that much trouble.

zw